Tony Charley one of the young children who had attended Kuper Island Residential school,  told CBC reporter Duncan McCue that the children in the school were constantly praying. They would wake up and and then were expected to start praying for a good day. Then they would pray to go to lunch. Constant prayer.

As McCue said, this constant prayer was part of a system to “change the child.”  They wanted to change the “savages” into good Christian children. As McCue said,

“this religious and patriotic indoctrination was part of a system designed to change the children. Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott said so in 1920 when he made residential schools compulsory. He said, ‘I want to get rid of the Indian problem. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question and there is no Indian Department.”

Of course, this idea was very congenial to the federal government, for as McCue pointed out,

“If there were no Indians there would be no treaty payments, no Indian reserves, no indigenous land rights. Residential schools were not created to deliver a proper education. They were created to assimilate Indians and went hand in hand with other federal policies to steal land. And it was little kids sleeping in rows upon rows of bunkbeds who paid the price.”

Assimilation is sometimes thought of as a benign policy imposed on Indian children for their own good. After, all what could be better for them than to be like us? It is true that many of the non-Indigenous staff thought they were doing the Lord’s work.

This was really Canadian government policy for a long time. Even the liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his minister of Indian Affairs Jean Chretien offered Indigenous people something very similar in 1969 in their White paper. Trudeau and Chretien were shocked that their offer was turned down by indigenous leaders. They didn’t want to be just like the whites. They liked who they were. They saw no need to change who they were. It was the system they didn’t like.

For many years I, like most Canadians thought it was a good idea for Indigenous people to be just like us.